[Haskell-cafe] Re: Python's big challenges, Haskell's big advantages?

Aaron Denney wrote:

On 2008-09-17, Jonathan Cast wrote:

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In my mind pooling vs new-creation is only relevant to process vs thread in the performance aspects.

Say what? This discussion is entirely about performance --- does CPython actually have the ability to scale concurrent programs to multiple processors? The only reason you would ever want to do that is for performance.

I entered the discussion as which model is a workaround for the other -- someone said processes were a workaround for the lack of good threading in e.g. standard CPython. I replied that most languages thread support can be seen as a workaround for the poor performance of communicating processes. (creation in particular is usually cited, but that cost can often be reduced by process pools, context switching costs, alas, is harder.)

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Kernel threads /are/ expensive. Which is why all the cool kids use user-space threads.

You must love Coyotos, then (http://www.coyotos.org/), which (IIRC) allows just that (via so called 'scheduler activations', see http://www.cs.washington.edu/homes/bershad/Papers/p53-anderson.pdf) Cheers Ben